Airbnb doubles down on brand over performance for campaign to draw more hosts

“Sometimes it just feels like a little bit too much work and if you’re new to the whole idea, it may seem a little bit overwhelming,” said Hiroki Asai, global chief marketing officer at Airbnb.

Previously reliant on performance marketing techniques, Airbnb returned to bigger, brand-focused campaigns after hiring Asai in 2020. In the first half of this year, the company’s sales and marketing spend rose to $1.08 billion, up 13.9% on the same period in 2023.

Airbnb’s message targeting potential hosts is wrapped up in “Airbnb It,” a brand campaign that has run since 2022. Its in-house creative team developed the campaign’s latest spot, “Rodeo”m to communicate the introduction of the internal market.

Though Asai declined to share budget details or a specific media mix for the campaign, he said it would primarily focus on paid social, including YouTube and Instagram. “There is a little bit of paid TV in some markets, but it is predominantly a social campaign,” he added.

Airbnb has also updated its on-site search to include destination recommendations based on users’ previous bookings and “suggested” search filters. The intention, Asai said, is to offer a “simpler, more intuitive” and more personalized experience for those booking vacations through the app.

The changes are Airbnb’s latest efforts to guard against competition from hotel chains and intermediary platforms such as Booking.com and Expedia-owned Vrbo, which launched its own campaign in April seeking to appeal to potential property hosts.

“They’re getting pressure from both sides,” said Stefan Siedentopf, group head of planning at VCCP, an agency that works with travel operator and airline EasyJet.

“Many large hotels have upgraded their facilities and started to embrace more local experiences. We’ve also seen a lot more boutique hotels, particularly in Europe, who offer more an independent, curated experience. That’s become more and more a threat to Airbnb,” he added.

As the price gaps between hotels and home-share experiences like those offered by Airbnb have eroded, brands in the hotel category, such as Premier Inn, have adapted to emphasize the convenience and consistency of their offers. Travel operator Tui credited an unexpectedly healthy start to 2024 to high demand for package holidays, for example.

“There’s definitely been a sort of swing away from the kind of traditional Airbnb and back towards hotels,” Katie Mulligan, a strategy director at creative agency Brave Spark, told Digiday.

In the face of those pressures, Siedentopf said Airbnb’s brand focus makes good sense.

“There’s a lot of direct and indirect competition. If that happens, you need to feed the top of the funnel,” said Siedentopf. “Consistency is so important. Consistency creates a compounding effect on creativity.”

Asai said Airbnb’s focus on consistent brand efforts doesn’t just bring commercial benefits, but it also helps shield the brand from the public criticism it’s faced in recent years.

For instance, Airbnb has grappled with local governments in the U.K. and Europe, which have attempted to crack down on the short-term rental market. And tourist hotspot Barcelona is set to implement a ban on short-term rentals starting in 2028.

Brand campaigns provide “a moat” between Airbnb and those critiques, Asai said. “Without us saying what we want to say and creating the message that we want … there’s a universe [on] social and [in] the press that’s going to create that message for us,” he said. “We just want to make sure that they’re understanding what we’re about and what’s important to us.”